HelioSkin
A Project by Jenny Sabin Lab
Cornell University
HelioSkin Research Team
PIs: Mariana Bertoni, Itai Cohen, Adrienne Roeder, Jenny Sabin
Project Manager: Anita Lin
Research Team: Zeiad Amin, Alana Berry, Si Chen, Jeffrey Chinemezu Enwere, Catherine Pak, Jeeya Savani, Avilash Singh, Yadav,Isabel Schinella, Michael Martinez-Szewczyk, Jinsong Zhang, Hanyu Zhang
From backyard canopies to wrapping buildings, HelioSkin integrates bioinspired design for beautiful solar collection skins. By leveraging the heliotropic performance of plants, HelioSkin generates more energy through mechanical tracking to serve sustainability-conscious and design-minded homeowners, organizations, and architects to increase public adoption of solar panels in the residential sector.
HelioSkin is a project under development as part of the 2024 NSF Convergence Accelerator. The approach is to develop a beautiful solar collection skin system with mechanical tracking capabilities, designed to seamlessly integrate into various architectural scales. Ranging from backyard canopies to wrapping buildings, HelioSkin leverages kirigami and auxetic geometry to mimic the heliotropic behavior of plants.
The proposed pilot design is a portable, dual-axis canopy of approximately 150 square feet that will morph and track the sun at the global surface of the canopy to optimize solar energy capture. The tensile system will host low power, tunable ePaper displays manufactured from roll-to-roll printing to enable consumer branding and lighting customization capabilities.